


The Grieving Process

by st_aurafina



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-07
Updated: 2011-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-21 03:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/pseuds/st_aurafina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been eight days since Alkali Lake. Charles is making a habit of avoiding Logan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Grieving Process

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2006 xmmficathon, for the prompt _Charles/Logan. Specific Request: Slash. A certain amount of mindcontrol may be necessary, but I'd really prefer emotional blackmail._

_Extract from "New Perspectives on Loss and Mourning" Xavier, C F, New England Journal of Medical Psychology, 29, 211-247._

Bowlby and Parkes1 elaborated the stages of separation response into four phases of grief during adult life: (a) shock and numbness, (b) yearning and searching, (c) disorganisation and despair, (d) reorganisation.

 _(1) Bowlby, J., & Parkes, C. M. (1970) _

 

 _Shock and Numbness_

Charles is making a habit of avoiding Logan. It's eight days now, since Alkali Lake, and Charles is a very busy man. There is hardly an hour where there is not someone at his side; dazed insurance agents rationalising the damage to the house, unnaturally motivated builders putting it all back together, traumatised students wandering sleepily back to their beds with their nightmares temporarily banished. Once, he catches himself dozing while an assessor drones on about acceptable risk. He awakes with a start, certain he felt the familiar brushed-silk texture of Jean's mind from the doorway, but it is only Logan, his thoughts bright with misery, lurking behind the closed door. Charles' mouth is dry with disappointment and guilt. He offers to refresh the assessor's drink. After a moment, Logan walks away.

Ororo cries in his study, thanking him for dealing with certain practicalities that are more suited to his strengths than hers: contacting Jean's friends from college, redistributing her possessions, cancelling her journal subscriptions. It gives Ororo more time to be with the students. Quite frankly, Charles is pleased they are rallying around her, rather than himself.

"You're coping so well. I don't know how you do it," she sobs. "If I couldn't come in here and cry, I think I'd go crazy." Dry-eyed, Charles pats her hand, and wonders if he has gone crazy already.

There are three people in the world who could understand how he feels. It would be a conceit for any other person to say this, but Charles' mind still resonates from extended mental contact with the world's population, so he feels uniquely qualified in this instance. Erik is the first. His name and his face lurk in dangerous parts of Charles' memories, threatening migraine and nausea and swirling fatigue. He cannot hold the thought of Erik for long before he finds himself picking up paperwork, or straightening the frames of paintings on the wall, distracted. He doesn't know who he hates more at this moment, Erik or himself.

Scott might have been able to detect that Charles is not managing as well as he would like others to believe, familiar with his Professor's physical tics and expressions. Scott, however, is lying in his room, paralysed with his own grief, and Charles does not have the strength or the courage to help him now. This leaves only Logan, who hasn't known Charles so long, but has a cunning way with body language. Logan can see Charles' weakness, because Logan senses all those visceral little actions that the body uses to communicate without words. Logan can smell guilt and fear and shame, and Charles knows that he must exude it.

 

 _Yearning and Searching_

Charles is dreaming of his old school, a place that smells of furniture polish and furtive sweaty thoughts. He recognises the time, close to the summer vacation in his fourteenth year. Tomorrow, a boy in Charles' class is going to hang himself in the showers, and they will find his body after gym class, fresh bruises livid on his pale skin.

"You could have stopped it," says Erik, incongruously floating above the wood-panelled floor, helmet tucked under one arm. "You could have spoken to him, let him know that he wasn't alone."

Charles reaches for him, feels the corner of the cloak slip through his fingers. There are ribbons of smoke fluttering up between cracks in the wooden floor. "I didn't understand. I tried to help him. I tried to protect him." He can hear the flames whispering through the dry wood beneath him.

"We have to go now, Charles, it's not safe here." Erik holds him, presses his face against the cloak, and they fly away from the school as the buildings begin to collapse. Charles rests his head against Erik's chin, exultant that Erik came to save him, then he realises that they have left someone very important behind. He struggles out of Erik's arms, and falls into the flames, choking on the smell of burning bone. Someone is screaming.

When he wakes, his throat is hoarse and his arms are aching. Without turning on the light, he sloshes whiskey into the glass on his bedside table and gulps it down, then lies on his side with his head curled toward his knees, waiting for the anaesthetic glow to quell the rising panic.

"You're drinking too much." Logan is lurking in the shadows by the wardrobe. His voice is low, but the sound is a shock, filled with resonance that tells Charles he has been having too many purely telepathic conversations lately. Real voices have substance and convey raw feeling that he finds hard to block at the moment.

"What do you want, Logan?" Charles narrows his eyes, even though the room is dark. Logan's presence is too vivid. From the other side of the room, he is aware of Logan's breathing, the little movements of his clothes against the wall.

"I've seen Jean around the house, heard her voice. Smelled her. Thought it might be some kind of telepathic projection from you, while you sleep."

Charles hefts himself upwards, rests a moment against the headboard. "Hearing the voice or seeing the face of someone we've lost, Logan, is a perfectly normal reaction to bereavement." He feels his voice thicken, and reaches for his drink, but Logan has his hand on top of the glass. Charles blinks. Did Logan blur a little as he moved?

"Yeah, well, if you can get your head out of the whiskey bottle for a minute, maybe you can tell me something. Are you doing this? Because I've lost people before, I know what you're talking about, how you catch a glimpse of them now and then." Logan pauses, and the thought process is easy to follow: I remember that. I mourned for someone. Charles winces, realising that memory has been amputated, leaving just a stump of sensation: the smell of rotting flowers, damp air thick with fragrant smoke.

Logan tips the whiskey down his own throat before Charles can protest. "This is something different, it feels real. And if it ain't you, then I'm wondering, is it Jean?"

 

 _Disorganisation and Despair_

This is a madman's errand, thinks Charles, as the elevator doors open. Logan has to help him manoeuvre the chair around the debris left by the raid on the house. There are only two lights still flickering in the corridor, and Charles fancies he hears Jean's voice in the ticking, humming tubes, sees the curve of her hip in a bent girder. Beside him, he can feel Logan's nerves singing with tension, tiny electrical explosions every time there is an unexplainable noise or shadowy movement. This is hysteria, Charles thinks as Logan levers open the door to Cerebro. We are two grown men looking for the ghost of a dead woman in the middle of the night.

"We shall both feel very stupid in the morning." Charles' words are bitter, as his chair moves smoothly onto the walkway of the machine that he and Erik built, that Erik tried to kill the world with, that he wouldn't let Jean use.

Logan closes the door with a heave, and the connection brings up the lights, shows the darkened places where panels were removed, like broken teeth. "If there's a chance Jeannie's alive, I don't care how stupid we look, Chuck." He swigs from the whiskey bottle, and hands it to Charles, who puts the bottle, warm from Logan's hand, to his mouth and swallows, then passes it back.

The console is functioning, and the head set engaged. Henry, another deliberately busy man, has been working hard in his spare time to repair the damage done by Stryker's men. The electrode terminals are cold and shiny as Charles slides them over his temples and engages Cerebro with a tentative thought. His neural pathways are still raw, from using Stryker's hastily assembled array, and from when Jean rode across his mind, controlling his voice. His stomach flip-flops: what if Scott found out what they were doing? Charles touches Scott's mind lightly and for the first time is grateful for the tangled swirl of pain and denial that occludes Scott's thoughts. He will not wake for many hours yet.

Logan lurks behind him on the catwalk, never quite standing still. Charles closes his eyes and tries to concentrate, but all he can hear is Logan, the leather jacket creaking as he shifts his weight from one foot to another, seething with nervous agitation. Logan fidgets like a cat, and Charles is surprised at how much easier it is to dwell on half-remembered images of Logan in movement, lean and knowing, than it is to focus his mind on looking for Jean.

"Did you find anything?" Logan leans over Charles' shoulder to peer at the console, and Charles wants to rub against his neck, let Logan mark him with scent. He can see all the places in Logan's mind lighting up, responding automatically to the non-verbal cues of attraction. It would only take a gentle push, there, to make Logan respond.

Logan tilts his head towards Charles, his breath is warm and whiskey-scented, and ghosts over the skin close to Charles' ear. Charles inhales sharply in response, and leans towards Logan's mouth.

"Are you messing with my head, Chuck?" Logan grabs the head set, and wrenches Charles' head away. "We're supposed to be looking for Jeannie." He puts his hand on the back of Charles' neck, and pushes it towards the console." Don't you want to find her? Or would you rather fuck around?" He presses his mouth against Charles' ear. "Did you fuck around with Jean too? Maybe give her a little encouragement to get out of the plane? It's true, isn't it? I can smell it on you. You reek of dirty secrets, squirrelling the facts away, doling the truth out in little spoonfuls."

Charles drags the head set off, tears the cable from the console, throws the whole assembly from the platform, waiting for the clatter as it hits the base of the chamber. The telepathic connection to Cerebro flails and tries to signal to him. Error! Error!

"Jean is dead, Logan. I felt her die. I can still hear her, but she's dead." Oh, God, the whispering in his head, her words forcing themselves out of his mouth. She died, he felt her go. Charles can't catch his breath, because dry sobs are escaping from his chest. He will hear that whispering forever.

"It was you! You let her go! You helped her die!" Logan spins the chair, leans his hands against Charles' chest, pushes him back hard against the console. His metal-laden body is heavy, and the console plinth groans under the strain. Charles wants him to push harder, snap the console, snap his spine, send him falling to the metal floor far below them. It would be so easy to let go, Logan is angry enough to kill, he probably won't even regret it. He closes his eyes and waits. Erik won't be coming to save him. Jean and Jason, two lives ruined by his own arrogant interference, will be avenged. This is the way it should end.

The end doesn't come. When he opens his eyes, Logan is looking down at Charles, anger fading away, replaced with something else – pity? Recognition?

With a half-strangled roar, Logan pulls Charles from his chair, sprawls on the walkway next to him, and reaches for the bottle of whiskey, miraculously untouched beside the console. Charles struggles to sit upright, and Logan helps, an arm under his own, a band of warmth wrapped around his back, giving him support where Charles' own muscles fail. Charles arranges his legs, leaning against Logan's body to keep his balance.

"Here." Logan hands him the bottle first. "I think we need a drink."

Charles spills whiskey on his shirt, but manages to deliver some to where it is intended. Logan takes the bottle from him, swallowing down an obscene amount of liquor.

"So you didn't know it was you? Making me see all that stuff?" Logan rolls the half empty bottle between his hands, then passes it back to Charles.

"It must have come from my mind. Perhaps it was a telepathic remnant. Or perhaps I really wanted to believe she was still alive." Charles sips a little more decorously from the bottle. His head is swimming as he scrabbles for the words to explain, "I worry that I have her consciousness inside my mind, that I am holding on to her, when she should be set free."

Logan laughs softly, and tightens his arm around Charles' shoulder. "Charlie, you don't hold Jeannie anywhere against her will. She goes where she wants to, and there isn't a force on earth that can stop her."

Charles is beyond tired, muscles aching and jangled, his head pounding, his face wet. When Logan leans across and kisses him, his mouth smoky with whiskey, it is a great relief to sink into physical sensation.

 

 _Reorganisation_

Logan, ever practical, takes them both back to Charles' room before they continue, never breaking the physical contact with Charles's body; stroking the back of Charles' neck in the elevator, leaning Charles' head against his stomach. When Logan lifts him from the chair, and places him on the bed, there is no time to admit embarrassment or even awkwardness. Logan is strong, physically adept, and unruffled by the trappings of Charles' disability. Charles is too wrung-out to be defensive about something so trivial as pride, so instead he leans up on his elbows to kiss Logan's throat. Clothes are soon shed, and the usual physical obstacle of non-responsive limbs is easily managed: Logan helps Charles arrange himself comfortably, smoothing out the cramped muscles, follows his hands with his mouth. Logan is at ease with Charles' body, and so Charles is able to lose himself in the exploration of Logan's: finding the places where the skin is soft, nipping and biting, teasing out a gasp in response.

He is surprised to find that Logan is an attentive lover: it is usually Charles' role to anticipate desires and interpret the needs of the other person. Logan has a certain bluntness in conversation, and Charles would have expected the same approach in bed. As Logan kneels above him, with wide-spread hands splayed across Charles' chest, eyes half-closed at Charles' ministrations, it suddenly seems clear to Charles that this is perfect communication, a language that Logan speaks more fluently than he, stripped away from the confusion of mixed messages and self-deceit.

Logan is attentive, but demanding, and drives into Charles at a relentless pace. Charles welcomes it, lets the rhythm wash all thought far away. When he comes, it is with the silent shock of an explosion, and white noise rushes into his mind. He is vaguely aware of Logan calling out in his own climax, and wraps his arms around the broad shoulders, gasping with him as the waves break.

The whiskey and the sex have done their work: dreamless sleep is not far away, and Charles is desperate to get to it. In the morning, there will be communication of a different kind, and life will go on.


End file.
